From: Christopher Murtagh <hidden> Date: 2002-01-28 20:34:12
On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Jim Potter wrote:
I've been running SMP YDL on a dual 500 for over a year; it's quite
stable.
I've been meaning to pass this on to the linuxppc-dev list for some time,
but I've been *insanely* busy. Sorry for the cross post if it ticks anyone
off.
Actually, this depends on what you are doing with the machine. My desktop
machine is a Dual-450 and it has been running very well. However, I had a
Dual-800 and a Dual-500 that I tried to put into production, and they both
crashed often. I had mentioned the 800 to BenH and he suspected a problem
with high-memory and potentially a 7450 problem. After a few 7450 fixes
were merged, I tried the most recent kernel (2.4.18pre1), and it made the
machine much more stable.
I think that the problem is also potentially network related, as when the
Dual-800 was in my office chugging away at internal stuff (low network
access), it ran without any problems. It even handled a serious stress
test (load average above 9.8 for over 2 hours). However, as soon as I put
it into production and it started taking on moderate traffic, it barfed
several times before I re-compiled the kernel and turned of SMP.
All of the above machines are running 2.4.18pre1 running Apache 1.3.20,
PHP 4.1.1, Postgres 7.1.3, htdig 3.1.16. Both the 500 and the 800 have 1GB
of RAM, but the 450 only has 512, so perhaps it is a high-memory with
networking problem?
So, SMP on the PPC platform has some work needed I'm afraid. I'd be happy
to help in any testing if someone wants me to, as I'd love to actually use
that other CPU on my dual 800. :-)
(Sorry for not answering you directly Eric, I've been swamped with work.)
Cheers,
Chris
--
Christopher Murtagh
Webmaster / Sysadmin
Web Communications Group
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
Canada
Tel.: (514) 398-3122
Fax: (514) 398-2017
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.../...
All of the above machines are running 2.4.18pre1 running Apache 1.3.20,
PHP 4.1.1, Postgres 7.1.3, htdig 3.1.16. Both the 500 and the 800 have 1GB
of RAM, but the 450 only has 512, so perhaps it is a high-memory with
networking problem?
So, SMP on the PPC platform has some work needed I'm afraid. I'd be happy
to help in any testing if someone wants me to, as I'd love to actually use
that other CPU on my dual 800. :-)
I recently spotted a problem with >512Mb (CONFIG_HIGHMEM or not) & SMP that
is fixed in the current bk _2_4 (2.4.18pre7). I also sent a fix to Marcelo
that should hopefully be in the next 2.4.18preX release.
You should also use sungem preferably to the old gmac driver.
Ben.
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From: Christopher Murtagh <hidden> Date: 2002-01-29 14:52:57
On Tue, 29 Jan 2002 benh@kernel.crashing.org wrote:
I recently spotted a problem with >512Mb (CONFIG_HIGHMEM or not) & SMP
that is fixed in the current bk _2_4 (2.4.18pre7). I also sent a fix to
Marcelo that should hopefully be in the next 2.4.18preX release.
Cool, thanks Ben! I'll give it a try soon.
You should also use sungem preferably to the old gmac driver.
Do you suspect that this is what is causing my crashes when the box is
exposed to moderately high network volume?
Thanks again.
Cheers,
Chris
--
Christopher Murtagh
Webmaster / Sysadmin
Web Communications Group
McGill University
Montreal, Quebec
Canada
Tel.: (514) 398-3122
Fax: (514) 398-2017
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From: Derrik Pates <hidden> Date: 2002-01-29 17:25:45
On Tue, 29 Jan 2002 benh@kernel.crashing.org wrote:
I recently spotted a problem with >512Mb (CONFIG_HIGHMEM or not) & SMP that
is fixed in the current bk _2_4 (2.4.18pre7). I also sent a fix to Marcelo
that should hopefully be in the next 2.4.18preX release.
You should also use sungem preferably to the old gmac driver.
Maybe you should officially deprecate the GMAC driver in favor of SunGEM,
then? Put something on its line in the config scripts that says
***DEPRECATED***, and something in Configure.help for it that says
something like "Please DO NOT use me, use the SunGEM driver instead!" so
there's no question, so maybe someday it can be dropped?
Derrik Pates | Sysadmin, Douglas School | #linuxOS on EFnet
dpates@dsdk12.net | District (dsdk12.net) | #linuxOS on OPN
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On Tue, Jan 29, 2002 at 10:25:45AM -0700, Derrik Pates wrote:
On Tue, 29 Jan 2002 benh@kernel.crashing.org wrote:
quoted
I recently spotted a problem with >512Mb (CONFIG_HIGHMEM or not) & SMP that
is fixed in the current bk _2_4 (2.4.18pre7). I also sent a fix to Marcelo
that should hopefully be in the next 2.4.18preX release.
You should also use sungem preferably to the old gmac driver.
Maybe you should officially deprecate the GMAC driver in favor of SunGEM,
then? Put something on its line in the config scripts that says
***DEPRECATED***, and something in Configure.help for it that says
something like "Please DO NOT use me, use the SunGEM driver instead!" so
there's no question, so maybe someday it can be dropped?
Well, I think the plan is to simply rm the file in 2.5.x :) Dropping it
from 2.4.x is probably a bad idea, since it's not broken for old things.
The defconfigs should probably be updated tho. :)
--
Tom Rini (TR1265)
http://gate.crashing.org/~trini/
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From: Eric Leblond <hidden> Date: 2002-01-30 07:00:15
le lun 28-01-2002 à 21:34, Christopher Murtagh a écrit :
On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Jim Potter wrote:
quoted
I've been running SMP YDL on a dual 500 for over a year; it's quite
Actually, this depends on what you are doing with the machine. My desktop
machine is a Dual-450 and it has been running very well. However, I had a
Dual-800 and a Dual-500 that I tried to put into production, and they both
crashed often. I had mentioned the 800 to BenH and he suspected a problem
The thing is that I was unable to boot. It hangs at the start at :
smp_core99_kick_cpu done
Maybe was it a misconfiguration in the OpenFirmware :
when I list the value of the vars in OF, i've got two vars :
betty_cpu0 passed
betty_cpu1 ......
Oops, I can't log today on the computer, I don't remember the second
value :-( which was different from the first.
I test it on 2 G4 with exactly the same hardware configuration.
By the way, MacOS 9.2 was highly unstable : it often hangs on netscape.
Cheers,
--
Eric Leblond
Mail: regit@regit.org
Page Linux : http://www-anp.lip6.fr/~leblond/linux/
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From: Alain RICHARD <hidden> Date: 2002-01-30 09:44:35
Just for information, why do you consider sungem better than gmac ? What
kind of functionnalities is it supposed to better handle than gmac ?
Also about the video cards, there is two options :
- ATI Radeon 7500 (32 Mo)
- NVIDIA GeForce4 MX (64 Mo of RAM)
Is there any clue about the support of each one ?
For information, I have used NVidia cards under intel linux boxes and it
is very boring having to get the driver from Nvidia and to patch the
kernel and the XFree with their driver. Also I don't think they produce a
driver for ppc linux.
Le mardi 29 janvier 2002, à 08:08 , benh@kernel.crashing.org a écrit :
quoted
quoted
You should also use sungem preferably to the old gmac driver.
Do you suspect that this is what is causing my crashes when the box is
exposed to moderately high network volume?
Maybe, only tests will prove me right or wrong.
Ben.
-------------------------------------------------------
Alain RICHARD <mailto:alain.richard@equation.fr>
EQUATION SA <http://www.equation.fr/>
Tel : +33 477 79 48 00 Fax : +33 477 79 48 01
Applications client/serveur, ingénierie réseau et Linux
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Just for information, why do you consider sungem better than gmac ? What
kind of functionnalities is it supposed to better handle than gmac ?
no copy, better perfs (after the latest tuning we did), better management
of link (including fallback to forced speeds if autoneg fails, ...), support
for ethtool ioctls, better power management (especially the chip isn't shut
down immediately on ifconfig down, but only after about 10 seconds which means
a dhcp client will work better).
Also about the video cards, there is two options :
- ATI Radeon 7500 (32 Mo)
- NVIDIA GeForce4 MX (64 Mo of RAM)
Is there any clue about the support of each one ?
ATI will probably work properly with 2D accel, end eventually DRI soon,
while nVidia will be problematic since they don't provide us with specs
nor drivers.
Ben.
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